It gave a disabled veteran his life back. What will it do for you?

Looking for a reason to try yoga? There’s probably never been a better one than this.

If you haven’t heard of him yet, get ready to be amazed (and have the tissues handy). Meet Arthur Boorman, the star of the latest video to wow the Internet. A former paratrooper who served in the Gulf War, too many years spent jumping out of a plane left him with chronic knee and back pain—issues so severe that doctors told him he’d never walk unassisted again. And for more than a decade, Boorman believed them. But then one day he bought some videos from DDP Yoga—that’s yoga à la Diamond Dallas Page, a champion wrestler-turned-yogi—and everything changed.

We caught up with Arthur Boorman to find out just how much yoga changed his life.

Prevention: Watching you transform in the video is amazing. Tell us about your body before starting yoga.

Arthur Boorman: I was in pain. I could not move very quickly. I was on crutches, had a back brace, leg braces, and a CPAP machine. I had an incident at my school one time where I actually passed out in front of a class.

P: How long were you overweight?

AB: Pretty much since I got out of the service. I was hurt a couple of times, but the mistakes were made by me—I was the one who decided to eat too much. I did more damage to myself with a fork and spoon and by giving up.

AB: It was about five years ago. I had gotten so heavy that I couldn’t weigh myself effectively. I would stand on two scales and then use an algorithm to figure out how much I actually weighed. When you have to do something that stupid to figure out how much you weigh, that’s self-delusional. And I don't want to be that guy who ages out as a human Rice Krispie: snap, crackle, pop at every move he makes.

P: How did you find DDP Yoga?

AB: On the Internet. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t looking for weight loss. I was looking for pain management, and looking at yoga as a pain management device. I definitely didn’t think any of this would happen.

P: And other yoga teachers wouldn’t take you?

AB: Yeah. I went to three places, and it was kind of embarrassing. It’s like, “What can we do with you? We don’t have anybody who can teach somebody with your disabilities.” I went back online and typed in “yoga and broken back,” and Diamond Dallas Page came up. He talked about raising your heart rate by muscle engagement rather than by jumping up and down, and I thought, “I can do this.”

AB: Lord knows how much I spent on diet books. What Dallas sent me was so simple. And it worked. It’s extremely low in gluten, and high in vegetables. Dallas was using small amounts of meat, chicken, and fish. I'm a vegetarian and used things like tofu and tempeh. That worked really well for me.

P: How long did it take for you to see results?

AB: I really saw results in the first couple of weeks. I was amazed at that. When I first started, I was doing 20 minutes a day, and then I started stepping up to the harder workouts. Physically, my body felt right. I created length in certain parts of my body that had been compressed for so long.

P: It’s incredible that you did all of this without a trainer. Did you work out alone in your house?

AB: Me and my cats. Every morning, the cats would gather around and give me grief. Even at the end [of the video] lying there in corpse pose, all of a sudden there’s a heavy weight on my chest—and there’s a big huge cat looking down at me.

P: What’s your best part of your new life?

AB: I can do things now that I couldn’t do. Everybody told me it wouldn’t happen. My regular doctors said, “Don’t get your hopes up.” But I said to Dallas, “I’m going to walk again,” and Dallas said, “Go for it.” The weight loss is fantastic. But if I didn’t lose a single ounce and my body still felt the way it does now, I’d still consider this a raging success.

P: Do you think anyone can do what you did?

AB: Yes. I absolutely, totally believe that what I did was not unique.